Is Vaping the Future of Drugs?

I don’t envy Big Tobacco. Not only are they still fighting the past sins of their industry, they’re facing stiff competition from two rivals nobody saw coming – technology and marijuana.

Rumors have run rampant in past years about Phillip Morris, RJ Reynolds, and the other big players in the tobacco industry eyeing marijuana grow and distribution operations. The emergence of liquid and herbal vaporizers put even more pressure on, as the giants were forced to compete with an army of entrepreneurs almost overnight. As these industries evolve, I can’t help but wonder how this will affect the future of drug use.

Opiates – The Other White Powder

Crack is commonly associated with poverty – it’s a ghetto drug, and, although cocaine isn’t much better. It’s been glamorized by Hollywood and the media in movies like Blow, Cocaine Cowboys, and The Wolf of Wall Street, among others. While neither form of cocaine is healthy, it doesn’t have nearly the foothold in modern society as opium, and all its pain-killing derivatives.

Next month Zohydro, an opiate newly approved by the FDA, hits pharmacy shelves. Painkiller abuse is an epidemic in the United States, and Big Pharm previously fought this by cutting pills with time-release compounds, anti-dissolving agents, and other filler. While anti-drug advocates fight on the front line against natural marijuana, these deadly drugs have already been approved for mass public prescriptions.

Krokodil Is a Harmful Homemade

Meanwhile, on the other end of opiate abuse, heroin addicts in the Midwest imported a method to synthesize an injectable pseudo-heroin called Desomorphine, a.k.a. Krokodil, from Russia. This synthetic mimics the effects of injecting heroin up until the point where it dissolves your body from the inside. Law enforcement agencies are aware of the drug and have begun efforts to crack down. With so many drugs up in the air, the youth are slowly turning toward an anonymous alternative.

The Magic of Vegetable Glycerin

I previously explored the practice of dissolving drugs in vegetable glycerin on my blog. Vaping became big in Arizona around the brief period of time Spice (a harmful synthetic marijuana) was temporarily sold in smoke shops.

An eyedropper of eLiquid costs anywhere from $7 to $45, so I had to check the ingredients. The main ingredients are vegetable glycerin, a common thinning agent used in foods, such as liquid eggs, and propylene glycol, the liquid used for theatrical fog machines.

Being food grade, vaping vegetable glycerin releases no carcinogens into your body or the atmosphere. It’s also the liquid drugs are dissolved into to make cough syrup (including codeine syrup, which is used to make sizzurp).

It wasn’t long before people started experimenting with dissolving opiates, cocaine, molly, and other drugs into vegetable glycerin to vape stealthily in public.

eCigs versus G-Pens

eCigs are currently banned from public usage in many municipalities, but, much like we saw with the medical marijuana movement, the industry is staying ahead of the curve. Dry herbal G-Pens have already been introduced to circumvent eCig regulations – illustrating marijuana’s mainstream acceptance while highlighting the underlying drug problem in our country.

However the laws go, the technology to build both liquid and dry vaporizers is already publically available. The web is already filled with mod kits and instructions to adapt your device to function as both.

Law enforcement can’t ban or regulate vegetable glycerin the same way they can meth ingredients – it’s food-grade and as widely used as duct tape. Where the Kindle has been instrumental in pushing the publishing industry toward paperless, the eCigarette is poised to push the drug industry to a healthier drug-delivery system.

Since the dawn of time, humans have searched for ways to reach a new state of consciousness. The rise of the Internet made instant gratification almost an entitlement in modern Western society. In this fast-paced rat race of technological innovation, the desire to alter moods and perceptions is as much a priority as food, air and water. As we move further into the Age of Innovation, one can only imagine what we’ll come up with next, but you can be sure it can be dissolved in vegetable glycerin and vaped.